Bright as a Gorgon's eyes (2/4)
Previous chapter.
***
Castiel didn’t exactly mean to kiss Dean.
The night wind was cool on their faces, and there was hardly any moon. The faint scent of the bogs flavoured the wind, and Dean’s confusion and misery hung heavy in the air as a shroud.
Castiel’s broken wing was strapped to his back, throbbing dully, but so much better than it had been before Dean had bound it - those long hours bedded down in that hollow after he’d crashed, hazy with pain. Waiting to be found - waiting for the sound of wings, or the sound of hounds. Hoping there was any chance that his people hadn’t given up on him, and sending out questing thoughts every now and then for any angel’s mind nearby. And in between, thinking of the humans he’d seen: much closer this time, so that the image of their faces and passions was printed into his memory. And their screams, after they’d been swallowed up by the smoke he’d made (demon magic, because it had been necessary) and other creatures that Castiel hadn’t detected had taken advantage of the darkness to make their own attacks. Creatures of the night.
The sounds had played over and over in Castiel’s head as he’d lain there, and he’d tried not to care, because he shouldn’t. Because he was already compromised enough. And yet somehow he’d kept finding himself rehearsing speeches in his head, trying explain himself to Dean. To those idealistic, trusting eyes he’d glimpsed back in the feed shed, eyes which had never seen civil war and would surely not understand the sacrifice of soldiers to a cause.
Honour had seemed so simple, once upon a time.
Only Dean had refused to listen. Dean had looked like it pained him, like it was hard work keeping the ideas of Castiel the enemy and Castiel the friend from colliding. Not so clear-eyed and delusional as Castiel had thought: and surely it was only a matter of time before Dean had to confront them both, and decide, one way or the other.
And, to be brutally fair, he had every reason not to choose Castiel. He didn’t know the place kept for him in Castiel’s soul, because Dean’s life and Castiel’s had, in reality, diverged long ago. The simulacrum that Castiel had guarded jealously for years was not the man standing beside him now, no matter how beguilingly similar they seemed.
But now, right now, Dean was here with him: Dean was struggling with the almost-loss of his own brother, and Dean was saying that sometimes he thought he’d imagined Castiel, that Castiel had been a dream to him as well. And Dean was leaning into him, subtly, trusting that Castiel would be there despite everything and yet not looking at Castiel like some sort of - of archangel. Still his own man.
The rush of affection knocked Castiel off balance like the sudden swirl of the tide, sucking him along with it, so that he couldn’t help but press in close in a way he hardly ever did with anyone (but it didn’t matter with Dean, because Dean didn’t know that, Dean didn’t have to look up to him) and Dean tipped his face in towards Castiel’s just right, and it was that simple to press their mouths together.
And Dean kissed him back, easy as anything. As if this was something they could both want: mouth tentative and certain against Castiel’s, dry and hopeful and so very honest.
Castiel had hardly thought about wanting it, but he did, oh, he did. Suddenly and viciously and selfishly, like a kick to his gut, so that he had to sigh into Dean’s mouth and press in closer, just for a minute, before he made himself pull away and kiss the corner of Dean’s lips instead.
“So did I you,” he murmured, and under it he meant, I missed you. I never knew who you were, but I missed you.
Which was illogical.
But so was all of this, and Castiel ached, and he might die tomorrow at the hands of Dean’s friends, and he wanted to be selfish. If dreams were all he could have for now, he’d hide in them. Just for a day.
This cottage here, whatever it was, served as an island: as distant from the humans’ village to adult eyes as the oak grove had been to a child’s. And if Dean refused to talk about enmity, or murder, or anything else that came with adulthood? That would do: maybe this could be the world Castiel had made for himself again, just for now. Just until Rachel came for him, or the hunt.
(He wasn’t sure that Dean realised just how often his eyes slid up over Castiel’s shoulder to linger on his wings; startled, every time, but never afraid.)
It wasn’t sensible, and it wasn’t practical, and it couldn’t last; but perhaps, until this ended one way or another, they might pretend that it was and it could.
***
Gabriel was alive.
Gabriel was alive, which meant that his death was a lie. A lie Gabriel had told.
He had staged his own death. Why?
Castiel remembered the months before he’d di- left. Gabriel’s laugh becoming sharper, brighter, more brittle with every death, and every betrayal. His only response, until it was impossible to draw a serious word out of him. And then, dead - dying alone, disillusioned and bitter, and Castiel’s comfort had been that perhaps it was a relief for him, that at least he hadn’t seen what had happened in the months that followed. At least he hadn’t seen the last piles of corpses, and what Michael and Lucifer had done to each other, and the dark shades of demons flitting away from the battlefield until the sky was streaked with black.
That had been the only clue as to the mystery of Gabriel’s death: there had been no demon, unless it had left very quickly and not come back. Killed by another archangel he must have been, surely - what else could do that to an archangel but another one? - but not face to face. Not with his hand and his sword. Some distant spell, or trap.
Castiel had never known which one, and some days he’d thought one, some days he’d thought another. So many fantastical stories he’d thought up of how it might have happened - Raphael, Lucifer, or Michael, and their various strange many-layered relationships with Gabriel, and the wayward moods of Gabriel’s last months. Explaining it away with Gabriel as a martyr who finally took a stand, or as the victim of his own caustic wit when he got too drunk and pushed someone too far, or just as a liability when someone decided they’d never win him over to their side and took that final brutal step before anyone else could.
But apparently all those stories had been wrong. All Gabriel’s evasiveness and deflections, all leading up to one final act of evasion.
All that blood - the organs crushed to pulp and the splintered remains of bones (had they been an animal’s?), the explosion of red and gold feathers (some wrenched out by the roots in great tufts, and how had he crept away after mangling his own wings so badly?), the one severed hand (fake, somehow, a very convincing fake, because Gabriel still had both of his, and Castiel had thought he’d known all of Gabriel’s tricks) decked with the little knotted bracelet that Castiel had woven for him after their parents’ death - their parents’ colours, their mother’s ribbon and charms of their father’s sigil - all that had been, for Gabriel, only another joke?
Gabriel was alive.
He had chosen to disappear. To leave Castiel with the double pain of mourning his brother and shouldering burdens that never would have fallen to him if Gabriel had been there.
And yet. Gabriel was alive.
***
It was strange, being back home in Eden.
It was strange having Gabriel here, for one thing: sharp and wary like he had been before he’d “died”, but differently: like he was used to it. Like it wasn’t a mask anymore, just who Gabriel was now. Except for the way he flinched away from anyone who tried to touch him, to re-establish those duties and loving touches they owed an archangel.
In private, Sam insisted (as insistently as he could when he had to spell things out with one paw) that it was only a result of the cage: that being locked up, and attacked by humans that Gabriel had trusted, had changed him. Castiel wasn’t sure that was the whole answer, the complete reason why Gabriel dodged every attempt by hand or wing or voice to treat him as family, or as the beloved leader he’d once been meant for.
He tried not to think the vicious word coward. Difficult, though, when Rachel had no scruples about spitting it openly in Gabriel’s face.
It was strange, also, arguing a truly revolutionary idea for once, against the sycophantic agreements, and the passive-aggressive are-you-sures and have-you-considereds, and the flat disagreements of those who never agreed with anything Castiel proposed just on principle because he wasn’t an archangel, and those who looked startled even to be asked to form an opinion, and now of course the withheld opinions of those who thought that the balance of power might change, now Gabriel was back.
Castiel had never considered himself a radical: to those who maintained that angels were meant to obey rather than lead, he usually replied that obviously every angel was capable of making their own decisions in their own household, and it was laziness and cowardice that kept them from making more momentous decisions outside of it. But this, bringing a human into Eden (and a human turned dog, although Sam could rarely get in a word in the storm of argument) and proposing an attempted truce, even an alliance - that was radical. Not only in policy, but in the change of thinking it would necessarily entail.
And yet not so radical, he thought, as it must be for the humans. For Dean’s people. For most of the angels back here, the humans were only a border war, a brief skirmish. After all, they rarely lost more than one angel in a two months to them, and what was that compared to their own kin-slaughter a few years ago? But from his conversations with Gwen, and hints dropped by Gabriel and Sam, he got the impression that Dean’s people would find it far more difficult to think of angels as anything other than killers.
It wasn’t only changes in the people around him that made this visit strange, though. It was the way Castiel was looking at them, as if his own perception had changed somehow without him noticing.
He found himself simultaneously more impatient - with petty squabbles, with people dithering over choices that could make an obvious change for the better in their lives, with people clinging to grudges that did them no good - and more compassionate, more interested in people he’d barely noticed before, as if all the details of the world around him were suddenly richer and more interesting than they had been. And he found he was smiling more: quicker to hope, to see some end to this, to the possibility of rebuilding rather than only surviving.
Strangely, people responded to that.
Was Castiel in love? Was this the mysterious alchemical effect that the stories talked of? Could Dean’s eyes have worked this change on him?
The ancients had believed that the eye perceived by touch, as the hands did: that it emitted invisible light which reached out to encounter the world, and conveyed it back to the senses just as fingertips did. Or something like that: Castiel’s memories of the classics were imperfect, because his education had been interrupted by the civil war, and the libraries had burned in the fighting. If he remembered rightly, though, in that philosophy sight would never be a passive thing. It extended itself to touch the world, and perhaps it changed it.
After all, it was the gaze of the sea witch that changed strong men into beasts. And Semele’s eyes had rebelled and burned her from the inside when they had rested on what was too great for them to comprehend.
And then there were those who had said - who still said - that love entered in by the eyes.
But that made the eye a submissive thing, to be entered and changed. And Castiel could not believe that of Dean’s delighted, delicious sparkle. Could the gaze not be assailant as well as defender? Launching darts, as well as taking them?
But could Dean make such a choice? Would he not take it back as soon as he was compelled to face reality? A dream was one thing: the daily grind of arguments and compromise was very different, and had undone the most devoted couples before now.
... Not that Castiel was thinking of romance. He had no time for romance. He never would. Honour came first: he had people to care for, and that would always be true. And that fact blocked from him any of the tenderer feelings, any of that mooning and lusting that he’d seen in other angels at other times (especially in Balthazar, because Balthazar was - had been - like that).
It was truer than ever, now. If there were others who could negotiate now, if there was an end in sight (however dim and distant)... well, Castiel’s value lay elsewhere. He was compromised, and he must follow through. He had a mission to complete, and if he survived it he didn’t expect to recognise himself at the end of it.
But that didn’t mean that, for now, he couldn’t dream. Quietly, alone, for himself; and more vocally for everyone else. To help make a different world, that might be able to include Dean - to include people like Dean. And like Sam, and Gwen, and Anna - people who could still look at the morning, and laugh with it.
When his people were safe, they would rebuild, and he was determined they would give Hester back her library. And this time, they would focus on oral memory, rather than written. There was a nation of angels across the narrow sea who, so Castiel heard, never wrote anything down; but even their children could memorise a ballad at a single hearing, and their trained scholars could retain an entire epic or philosophical discourse in their minds with little effort. Hester insisted that the written word was the safer one, but Castiel doubted that. He argued that they had seen how easily it could be erased. And in any case, writing meant parchment, and parchment meant sheep. Angels were not herders, and the cost of trading for every single sheepskin (when a single sheep yielded so very few pages) was prohibitive, especially when there were so many other things yet to rebuild.
Only sometimes, quietly, at night, Castiel drifted into his newer, richer dream world, the one with a grown-up Dean in it who would turn to Castiel and look at him like he was a wonder and a banquet, all at once; the one that now had a house, and a bedroom, and a kitchen, and all the little skills of managing those mysterious spaces that Castiel had never had time to learn from his parents; and Castiel would wish fiercely that he could be selfish, that he could be his own man, that he could stay.
For the first time in a long time Castiel was thinking beyond the battle, and it did strange things to his head.
***
Back to the lands of Dean’s people, and Lucifer’s demons. Back into the fray; but Dean’s dreams showed an ambivalence and a fear that Castiel couldn’t just wave aside. In the dream that Castiel had visited, Dean had shaped him as a foreigner, something seductive and dangerous and unrecognisably smooth. And perhaps that ought to have been a warning (Castiel certainly meant to take it as one), except that as soon as Castiel was in front of him again Dean seemed to forget all about that and went right back to being possessive, and fierce, and devoted, and layering it all over with the most casual of smirks.
Humans were very strange, Castiel decided. Or maybe (and given Gabriel’s behaviour, this was a far more likely hypothesis), people were very strange.
Did that make Castiel strange? Castiel doubted it: his own mind was a logical and safe place, so far.
***
The bed was warm and comfortable, and there was sunlight drifting through the window and lying hot across his wings, and Castiel was drifting in the comfortable, groggy, not-quite-awake somnolence of healing.
There was movement outside the door, the snick of the latch and the creak of the hinges. Castiel dragged himself back towards awareness just far enough to turn his head on his arms and open one eye a crack, glaring at the door.
Not Rachel, come to hover. Not one of the villagers, for whom Castiel would have had to wake up properly in case of dangerous intentions. Just Dean, and soup, and a new water jug, and the smell of lanolin and herd beasts.
Castiel made a grumbling sort of noise and buried his face in his arms again.
“Morning, sunshine,” Dean grinned, like he was trying to be obnoxious and loud but didn’t really want to raise his voice to do it. It turned his voice into a sort of low, laughing purr that stirred Castiel’s blood sluggishly in his body.
“G’way,” he mumbled, because he wasn’t awake and Dean was making him be awake and he didn’t want to be awake and also he was sleepy. And not awake.
“Not a morning person, huh?” The door closed, and Dean padded over to set the bowl and jug on the low cupboard by the bed, with a dull ceramic thack-thup.
Castiel squirmed resentfully in his nice comfortable nest. Then he squinted blearily over the top of his wrist in the general direction of Dean, who was still standing there being all warm and beautiful and annoying. “A wha’?”
Dean burst out laughing.
Which was something Dean seemed to do a lot, and Castiel rather liked it, so he just glowered a bit more and let him do it, because better that than the dead, malicious grins of the demon that had worn Dean’s face for a while. And it lit him up, and he laughed with his whole body as if he’d forgotten the rest of the world for a moment, and his eyes crinkled at the corners and it was a wonder to watch.
And Castiel, meanwhile, was lying here grumpy and bleary and unwashed and unshaven and bedraggled, and very far from bright. And he should be hating the fact that Dean was here, seeing him like this, because he always hated anyone seeing it, especially people before whom he wanted to appear well; only somehow, with Dean, he couldn’t bring himself to care. Dean’s presence was only a quiet, comfortable relief - and a sleepy murmur of anticipation.
“You smell of sheep,” he muttered, pleased with the childish feel of it; and that set Dean off again.
When Dean was done with being rudely entertained by the fact that Castiel was still not awake, he peered down at Castiel with his eyes still warm and creased into amusement, and Castiel tried to give him a you-are-insufferable look but didn’t really manage it.
“So the wings go over the blankets, huh?”
“Soup,” Castiel mumbled resignedly, because he wasn’t going to get to sleep again until Dean was done here.
“Oh! Right.” This time Dean’s grin sounded like embarrassment, as if he’d actually forgotten what he’d come in here for and was trying to cover it up with roguishness, and there was no reason for that to make Castiel’s mouth try to tug itself into something soft.
Turning around was too much effort - lifting his wings out of the way and resettling them along the headboard without tugging at the stitches - so he shuffled sluggishly back in the bed until he could push himself up to kneel on the mattress, blankets slithering down his back to pool around his hips as he twitched his wings to let them loose. Dean, he noticed, was doing his best not to look at Castiel’s bare chest as he sat down on the side of the bed. His eyes would slide down there then tug awkwardly back up to Castiel’s face, and there was a splash of colour in his cheeks that made Castiel want to reach out and touch it.
So Dean was attracted, still. It hadn’t just been the brief flare of reunion and danger that had made him lean into Castiel, twice, and press their mouths together. But if Dean wasn’t certain - well, attraction and friendship were not enough to make so important a choice, even if circumstances hadn’t been stacked against them - and so it would be dishonourable on Castiel’s part to reach out for him, unless Dean gave a much surer sign than that.
And yet there was a strange, pleasurable power in knowing that Dean felt an attraction: the kind of head rush Castiel never got from real magic. It was in the way Dean cleared his throat and grinned with only half his mouth as he offered Castiel the bowl, in the awkwardness of his hands as he tried to offer to hold the spoon until Castiel glared it out of his grasp and managed it himself, in the way Dean kept half leaning in towards him as he chattered on (just as he’d always done), the way he kept looking sideways at Castiel, the way his eyes kept snagging on Castiel’s face and mouth and throat, long and lingering.
Anna, apparently, was doing well - she was making friends with many humans, as Castiel had suspected she had wanted to, and she and someone called Charlie were “thick as thieves”, whatever that meant (Dean seemed to mean it as a compliment). Sam was happy and busy and earnest and making up for his voiceless weeks by talking non-stop, and the groundwork for the negotiations was continuing slow but steady, in preparation for whenever Castiel should feel well enough to come down and join in. The reason Dean smelled of sheep was shearing season, which apparently meant that even people who weren’t farmers had to lend a hand. And that explained why Dean hadn’t been in to see him before, or at least not in Castiel’s brief periods of consciousness.
It was strange: there was a certain heat that Dean’s gaze sparked in Castiel’s chest. There was a thrilling selfishness to it, and a secret delight, of a kind that he’d believed was dead to him. It hadn’t been so long ago that he had thought that all his softer feelings had been burned out, and all his trust. Not only by the war, but by everything he’d had to do in the last few months, the darkness of the places he had been obliged to go, and the cruelties that had been necessary. He had felt the darkness looming - especially after Balthazar’s death - the image of Lucifer’s plunge into blackness waiting for him. In those two weeks between losing Balthazar and finding Dean, he could have faced down Lucifer’s demon, died in defeating it, and not regretted his own death so long as he took it with him.
Now - now he he wanted not only to win, but to survive. Hopeless as it was, whether Dean wanted him or not, Castiel wanted life, with all its peculiar twists and turns, and all its hurts, and all its wonders. And this deliciously slow burn of desire deep in his belly.
Hardly an opportune time to discover it, but Castiel couldn’t bring himself to resent it. Not right now, not with the pleasant drag of sleep heavy in his mind and Dean’s shoulder warm against his and the sweet rumble of his voice sliding into Castiel’s chest and making itself at home there.
Castiel was not deadened inside after all.
And if that was true... well, he still had the same task to complete, but now it ached more. Maybe this was one last bittersweet gift, before he gave himself up.
He almost managed to finish the bowl before the somnolence rose up like the tide and tugged him back down, turned his limbs to mush and dragged him into the mattress. Dean made soft, amused noises that Castiel barely heard, and put the bowl away, and tugged the blanket up over his back when Castiel lifted his wings out of the way, and ran his hand up to splay warm between his shoulder blades as Castiel resettled his wings over the blanket.
And he lingered there. And Castiel didn’t tell him to go, because his hand was warm and it felt good, solid and vivid and soothing. When it trailed a little higher to trace the muscles in the back of his neck, Castiel made a noise that meant “don’t stop” and arched into it, just a bit.
“Dean,” he mumbled into the pillow. “Would you. For your family. Would you turn yourself into a monster, if it would save them.”
The hand on the back of his neck squeezed a little tighter. “Already did, dude. I let the demon in, remember?”
No. That wasn’t the same thing at all, because that hadn’t been Dean. Dean had still been in there, still him, still fighting, and Castiel had been able to look into the demon’s eyes and see that. Sharing a body with something was not becoming that thing, but Castiel wasn’t sure quite how to say that. And he was quite sure that he didn’t want to. Not to Dean. Not now. Maybe another time, when he needed to know.
“Foolish,” he grumbled instead, because it had been. Dean wasn’t meant to be that. It was Castiel’s path, not Dean’s, and Dean was meant to be safe.
“Yep, so you said,” Dean agreed blithely and completely without repentance, and his fingers slid up a bit to nudge into the curls at the top of Castiel’s neck. “And Sammy, and Ellen, and Bobby, and just about everybody else. Got the job done though, didn’t it?”
“I got the job done,” Castiel muttered. Dean just chuckled like Castiel was being a petulant child instead of making a valid point, and his fingers combed up through the back of Castiel’s hair, and vanished.
***
Castiel had wondered about this, from time to time. He had looked at other angels and wondered what it was to want - whether he himself preferred men, or women, or both - but had he never had time for those impulses, had barely ever felt a twinge of it in looking on another’s body. And yet every curve and shape of Dean’s body made him want to reach out and touch: every roll of his shoulders, every tug of his mouth.
Perhaps it wasn’t either men or women for Castiel, then, but only a true companion - one that he could lean on and who would lean on him as necessary, one who could share strength with him without outmatching him and hold up his or her own part in a battle without being a weakness who needed constant protection. One whom Castiel could rescue, and who could rescue Castiel if he should need it.
Or maybe it was just that Dean’s smirk was infuriating, and his smile was infectious, and Castiel wished he could study them all his life.
***
Next chapter.